Your company's craven policy of capitulation in the face of the mere
hypothetical threat of terrorism is absolutely appalling -- a complete
moral abdication that only encourages those threatening our rights and
liberties.

This has nothing to do with sensitivity; it's all about pure, simple
fear. If a Christian group complained to Borders about Bibles being
placed on a bottom shelf, they would be laughed out of the room. But
when Muslims do the same thing, Borders institutes a store-wide policy.
The difference? The implicit or explicit threats of violence that
accompany the latter.

At Huffington Post we have, … um, nothing. Hm.

But Borders is ticked right back. In an open letter to Charles Johnson,
the CEO writes:

Charles, I've got a book store to run and having you sic a bunch of
bloggers on me and tell them to ride my ass because we're not shelving a
pip-squeak magazine from those tools at the "Council for Secular
Humanism" (Jesus wept!) is just not getting it done.

Please note that it's already April 1 in some parts of the world.
Most links via Instapundit.

Pinkerton's Panacea

The second
part of James Pinkerton's two-part series on
the "crisis of process" in the Federal Goverment is up at
Tech Central Station. (The first part is here, which
I blogged about here.)

The new article provides more thought-provoking points, but I'm less
convinced of Pinkerton's diagnosis as time goes on, and so I'm
even more skeptical of the "fix" he proposes.

The fix, is, essentially, to reshape and reorganize the Executive Branch:

Take the functions of the federal executive branch and turn them all
into five "super departments." That is, take the existing unwieldy 15 Cabinet
departments -- and umpty-ump independent agencies -- and collapse
them into a user-friendly quintet:

The five heads of these "super departments" would be "Super Secretaries"
working closely with the President.

I'm far from an expert on organization issues; it could very well be
that this might "work better" (in some sense). But Pinkerton's arguments
aren't very convincing.

Take
the one of the prime examples he thinks demonstrate
the need for a "fix":
FEMA's Katrina response. In the first article he claimed
that the problems were due to FEMA being "tangled up in turf issues
inside the Department of Homeland Security." But in the second article:

But, some will object, what about the Katrina/FEMA problem? That is,
Washington wisdom these days is that the once-independent Federal
Emergency Management Agency lost clout when it was folded into the
Department of Homeland Security. Ex-FEMA chief Michael Brown
says he was unable to muster sufficient resources to react to Katrina,
because he didn't have the pull, buried as he was inside the DHS domain.
There's some merit to that argument, but there's even more merit to the
argument that "Brownie" wasn't
very good. And as noted, Chertoff doesn't add much value, either.

Erm, so which is it? Incompetent people, or a "process failure"? Will
solving one problem solve the other? Why? There's a lot of handwaving
in Pinkerton's article, but no clear and convincing demonstration that
a reorganized Executive Branch would have gotten relief to New Orleans
any faster than the current one did.

I tend to think we don't have a "crisis of process" so much as two other
things:

A crisis of vision: Pinkerton doesn't consider that it
simply might be that no central goverment can handle
certain things competently. His historical examples of government
"working" are, tellingly, all about war: his heroes are Lincoln,
Roosevelt, and Truman.

I'm willing to grant that centralized governments do a great job
of killing their enemies, foreign and domestic. But it's at least
plausible (and, I think, real likely)
that other sorts of governmental tasks are better off decentralized.
Pinkerton's plan doesn't really deal with this.

A crisis of PR; the standards by which government is said to "work" are
notoriously flexible. Generally, opinion makers and the media will
think the people they like are doing a heckuva job. Since a lot of those
folks currently despise Bush, they're more than happy to play up
bad news and assign blame. And we conclude that "government doesn't
work".

Republicans Probably Need to Lose

Everyone who despises restrictions on political expression
should read Byron York's article
at National Review describing how Republicans are
lining up behind an effort to restrict funding for so-called
527 groups.

In the meantime, a US District Judge has ordered the FEC to "explain in
detail why regulations are not needed or begin proceedings to develop
such rules." The FEC voted in 2004 to not regulate 527s. The GOP
apparently feels they'd rather shut down the 527s' free speech
(calling it a "loophole") than compete with the Democrats in this area.

It's outrageous that so few members of the major parties can be relied
on to consistently protect and defend political expression.

I've written my Congressman, Jeb Bradley! Of course, he only just now
got
around to answering my mail about the House Majority Leader
race a couple days ago. That election was held nearly
two months ago. (He voted for Blunt. Sigh.)

URLs du Jour

2006-03-30

Via InstaGlenn,
Tim Blair links
to a news story that Borders and Waldenbooks are not stocking
the upcoming issue of Free Inquiry magazine, because it
contains pictures of the Prophet You-Know-Who. And, since Tim
has a long memory, he also points out Borders' previous sanctimonious
hosting of banned-books events. It's a great day for hypocrisy.

Andrew Sullivan suggests
a boycott. Sure thing, glad I can agree with Andrew about something.
(I wish I could pretend this was some great
sacrifice, but the nearest Borders is about 40 miles from my house.)

Slate's Paul Boutin sticks a well-deserved sharp pin in the hype balloon of
"Web 2.0". Much more on target, methinks, than the Andrew Keen
article I discussed here.

Clayton Cramer goes to Moscow and back
and provides pictures. Including a couple of the
fabled "Schiermans Slurp•N•Burp".

Immigration is one of those topics where I often find myself
agreeing with the last thing I read. So while I found Professor
Sowell making a lot of sense a couple of days ago,
I'm also thinkin' Professor Caplan makes a lot of sense
here
and here.
Even though they're on opposite sides. Hm, how to decide?
Caplan's got the better basketball team on his side … although
I bet Sowell could take Caplan in a one-on-one …

I'm very confused.

Carl Schaad juxtaposes, right in front of God and
the Whole Wide World. (Updated with permalink, removed snide comments
about their being no permalinks, removed description of amusing
filed-under tags, which are now gone. Whew.)

Serendipitous Reading

On Sunday, I read thisNew York Times
article about curricular changes brought about by No Child
Left Behind.

Thousands of schools across the nation are responding to the reading and
math testing requirements laid out in No Child Left Behind, President
Bush's signature education law, by reducing class time spent on other
subjects and, for some low-proficiency students, eliminating it.
…

The intense focus on the two basic skills is a sea change in American
instructional practice, with many schools that once offered rich
curriculums now systematically trimming courses like social studies,
science and art.

URLs du Jour

2006-03-28

Charles Murray has a thought-provoking
new
scheme to scrap the American welfare state:

… I call it simply "the Plan" for want of a catchier label--makes a
$10,000 annual grant to all American citizens who are not incarcerated,
beginning at age 21, of which $3,000 a year must be used for health
care. Everyone gets a monthly check, deposited electronically to a bank
account.

OK, so now almost everyone's saying "Waiiiit a minute …"
Murray's
written a book about the Plan: In Our Hands
: A Plan To Replace The Welfare State (which I've just ordered).
Tech Central Station's Max Borders interviews Murray here. K-Lo
is the interviewer here.
Andrew Ferguson comments here.
I'll
write more once I've read the book.

It occurs to me that I could, if I wanted, get a lot of cheap posts
by simply filling in the blank in the template:
"Thomas Sowell makes a lot of sense today with a column
about ;
check it out." And then maybe quoting one or two paragraphs
to give readers a feel for what he's saying, wrapping it up
with a short snappy remark.

Thomas Sowell makes a lot of sense today with a column about immigration;
check it out.

How often have we heard that illegal immigrants "take jobs that
Americans will not do"? What is missing in this argument is what is
crucial in any economic argument: price.

Americans will not take many jobs at their current pay levels -- and
those pay levels will not rise so long as poverty-stricken immigrants
are willing to take those jobs.

See?

Is it wrong to cheer for a college basketball team simply because
you admire the school's
economics and law faculty?
I'm pretty sure I wouldn't recognize as many names from any other
school. Including UNH.

I don't remember when I last watched a basketball game. But I watched
George Mason beat … um … oh, yeah, UConn on Saturday.
Go, Pats: the team of the libertarian blogosphere.

But go ahead and improve your mind while you're waiting for the next
game: via Todd Zywicki at the Volokh
Conspiracy, here's a
PDF resource about the Forgotten Founder, the Father of the
Bill of Rights, George Mason. (It does not, unaccountably, mention what
Mason's free throw percentage was, but gets in a lot of other impressive
stuff.) Andy at the Club for Growth has additional links
and Mason-related tourism suggestions.

Consumer note, Entertainment Division: USA Todayreports
that the King Kong
DVD out today is OK,

But you won't see any deleted scenes or added footage. Director Peter
Jackson is saving that for an extended cut of the film to be released on
DVD later this year and will include a new making-of documentary.

Setting the Global Thermostat

Drudge points out
Time's "Special
Report" on global warming. It's unusually hysterical, even for
Time.
And it has drawn the usual debunkers; for example, see Red
State.

There are plenty of risks on all sides.
One possible near-term outcome is draconian regulation that will wreck
the global economy, increasing international resentment,
and have minuscule effect on greenhouse gas levels. The
folks that (for example) criticize the Kyoto treaty in this regard are
pretty convincing. (For example: Pete Du Pont in today's WSJ.)
But they're getting drowned out by doomcriers
on all sides.

However, I think nearly everyone is arguing about the wrong stuff: whether
global warming is happening, how much is caused by human action,
how much regulation could help, whether Al Gore is insane by official
clinical
standards or just in an eccentric-aunt kind of way, etc.

Forty years ago, the noted atmospheric scientist Roger Revelle declared
that
"human beings are now carrying out a large scale geophysical experiment"
by
pumping billions of tons of carbon dioxide into the air. The question
before us
should not simply be how best to stop the experiment--and, by extension,
the
prosperity and progress allowed by cheap, abundant energy.

Rather, the question should be how best to
design that experiment, so
that we maximize benefits and minimize costs. As the citizens of the
advanced
nations become convinced that global warming is an immediate threat
worthy of
response, they will legitimately ask for solutions that demand the least
sacrifice.

Benford goes on to propose a host of relatively cheap technical
"geoengineering" fixes to sop up carbon from the atmosphere,
raise planetary albedo, and the like.

This goes against the environmentalists who see "mankind as the problem", of
course; their quasi-religious
vision is an Earth on which humans have at best minimal
environmental impact. Let's ignore that for now. (And hopefully
forever.)

It seems this argument is hard to refute:

We have the ability to mitigate global warming right now; we even
had it back in 1997, when Benford wrote his article.

We're only going to get better at it;
on the decades-to-centuries time scale envisioned by global warming
proponents, advances in technology and climate modelling will easily
outstrip the problem.

Hence, Real Soon Now we'll be able to dink the global climate
to pretty much
whatever temperature we want, without driving the global economy
into a regulatory ditch.

So what's the problem again? Well …

There's a sense in which technological solutions to global warming
are even scarier than global warming itself. You think you have conflicts
setting the thermostat in your house, with Pa wanting to save energy
and Ma wanting it warmer, and the kids complaining no matter what?
Multiply that kerfuffle by a few billion, erase the familial love,
and give everyone armed forces. Uh oh.

But if geoengineering our way out of global
warming seems difficult,
it's even less likely that we'll do it via legislation and
the heavy hand of regulation. I know where I'd be putting
my money.

Kinsley on Billionaires

Michael Kinsley can make sense at times, but more often he's merely
infuriating. Last Thursday's op-ed in the Washington Post
is an example, and it appears to have cheesed me off more than usual.

According to Forbes magazine, the world is enjoying a boom in
billionaires. Twenty years ago there were 140 billionaires. Three years
ago there were 476. This year there are 793.

You can check out the stuff Forbes has made available online
here.
Kinsley appears to have read at least first few sentences of
this article (and has summarized them in a non-plagiaristic manner). Did
he read anything else? Let's see.

Some people automatically associate great wealth with evil, and they
deserve the ridicule they get. But the automatic association of great
wealth with virtue is equally fatuous.

Kinsley implies a tired and fallacious argument:

Let's
imagine two diametrically opposed, absurd positions that some (unnamed)
people might hold;

I hold neither of these positions;

hence
I am reasonable and correct.

Anyone convinced? Me neither. Let's move on:

It's probably true that most billionaires have acquired their wealth in
ways that make life better for the rest of us.

Hedging and vagueness with "probably" and "most", but it's
good that Kinsley acknowledges this up front.

I bet you can tell me, without peeking, what the first word of his
next sentence is, however.

But the Forbes list includes plenty who merely chose rich parents.

Still vague ("plenty"), and
getting way too cute with the tired "chose rich
parents" cliché.

There are many whose accumulation of vast wealth, however gumptious,
does not fit the Adam Smith model of individual drive and greed being
channeled into activities that benefit all.

Still vague ("many"), but undoubtedly true.

The rising value of exclusive franchises given away by the government,
such as cable TV and cellphone licenses, creates billionaires without
generating any general social payoff.

This is probably the best sentence in the article. Yes, many governments
(not just "the" government) shower economic favors on
groups and individuals. It's an interesting and important topic.
But Kinsley is on the moral indignation road, so this is a mere aside.
We go immediately from a valid insight to sheer fatuity:

Real estate investors do not create a square inch of land.

Free advice to op-ed columnists: when you find yourself writing a
trivial and obvious truth
as if it contained some precious
insight, maybe you should examine your assumptions. OK, real estate
investors don't create land. Duh. What do they do?
Never mind, because Kinsley just barrels along:

Meanwhile, science undermines the notion that people deserve moral
credit for their smarts, daring, vision, dedication and similar virtues,
even when these are applied in socially beneficial ways. Intelligence
was the first to go. Why should you get the credit if your brains make
you a billionaire? Increasingly, neuroscience and evolutionary
psychology are showing that the same logic applies to other admirable
qualities.

Kinsley's invocation of "science" is tendentious bullshit. If people deserve
"moral credit" (or, for that matter, moral blame) for
anything at all, they deserve
it for what they do: the uncoerced choices they make. "Smarts" (etc.)
are involved only indirectly, in the sense
that they may make it more likely
that people will make good choices, and (hence) deserve
moral credit.

If you can imagine
(say) people of equal "smarts" (etc.) making different
uncoerced choices, doesn't it necessarily mean they deserve whatever
moral credit (or blame) as a result? Sure. Kinsley's just wrong.

(Of course, if "science" has made you a thoroughgoing determinist,
then people don't "really" make choices at all, and "moral credit"
and "moral blame" are simply illusions. But Kinsley isn't saying that,
is he? I don't think so; it's hard to care.)

Adam Smith explained how our individual efforts serve the common good.
We work to produce things that can be traded for things we want. That's
an improvement on making everything that we consume ourselves. The first
exchange of one caveman's dinosaur meat for another's rather attractive
decorative rock started a process that, after millions of years, leads
to DVD players at Wal-Mart that cost less than DVDs. Or something like
that.

A breezy trivializing of the process by which great masses of people
have escaped subsistence and privation, don't you think? Again, there's
a good story there, but Kinsley's only interested in being
superficial here. He's eager to go back to sneering at rich people:

But billionaires are beyond the desire for more money to buy more stuff.
Just look at Forbes's breathy descriptions of the billionaire lifestyle.
Add it up. Yachts can cost up to $300 million to buy plus 10 percent
annually to run, and a Russian on the list has three. So you need three,
all bigger than anyone else's. Assuming that each one sinks after five
years, this will cost you $270 million a year. The most expensive car
Forbes could find was something called a Bugatti Veyron, costing $1
million. Get a new one every year -- heck, get three -- throw in a
full-time driver, and luxuriate in a visit to Jiffy Lube whenever you
feel like it, and you're still talking barely $4 million a year. Forbes
reports that actually the top 10 billionaires drive cars much cheaper
than this.

OK, so Kinsley did read beyond the first paragraph of the
main article; good for him. But, despite his proclaimed interest in the moral
worthiness of how these 793 acquired their wealth, he's really more
interested in sneering at their alleged need to acquire conspicuous
amounts of stuff.
But note the tailing admission about the cars; doesn't it
cast some disconfirming cold water on Kinsley's point? Let's look
at what Forbes actually says:

The cars and trucks driven by those in the Top 10 of the 2005 Forbes
list was, in short, shocking. You won't find a Bugatti, Ferrari or BMW
driven by these billionaires. But you will find a Lincoln, a Mazda, even
a Dodge and Ford. It seems that for the super-rich, a vehicle is seen
not as a status symbol, but as a means to an end in which to get from
point A to point B. Status is something that these billionaires need not
prove to others. In many cases, the people on our list prefer to live
inconspicuously, avoiding the limelight at all costs. This might explain
why many of their vehicles cost less than your own daily driver.

Emphasis added. But never mind, Kinsley rolls on:

House? Prince Ahlwaleed bin Talal Alsaud has a palace that cost $130
million. Suppose you own five of these, and every 10 years you start
again. Even including maintenance, air conditioning and condo fees, you
have to struggle to hit $100 million a year. Put one of your houses on
your own private island. The most expensive island Forbes could find for
sale was listed at $39.7 million. Buy a new one every year, but don't go
see it. Fly a private jet to the Bahamas instead. Forbes says you can
charter a plane to the Bahamas for $40,000. So do that every weekend. It
adds up to $2 million. Check into a nice hotel. Add another million and
use the mini-bar.

More of the same. Is there a point to be made in largely
imagining how a billionaire might spend money?
I suppose that, if you're writing op-eds, you have to come up with a
word count, and this is how Kinsley does it. (For someone
who felt it necessary to point out "Forbes's breathy descriptions of the
billionaire lifestyle", Kinsley is pretty breathy himself.)

Staff yourself silly with personal assistants and special
British-trained security agents. Have a Starbucks latte every single
day. Total? Uh-oh, you're spending over $400 million a year. At that
rate, the average billionaire's $3.3 billion stash could be gone in less
than a decade. But about 90 percent of that is the boats and the houses.
Settle for one maximum-size yacht, two enormous houses (plus a Las Vegas
time share) and only one private island. Congratulations, you're down to
barely $100 million a year. At that rate, you can live like a Saudi
prince, and $3.3 billion will last you and your children forever.
(Depending, of course, on how many children you have. This guarantee
does not apply to actual Saudi princes.)

Three paragraphs of nearly fact-free snarking at how someone
might spend their wealth. Anyone see a point? If you
do, Kinsley's about to pull out the rug:

Surely billionaires are not inspired to accumulate more billions by the
prospect of a third gigantic yacht. Most billionaires spend far less
than these amounts.

"So never mind that stuff I've been writing about."

Many of them give huge amounts to charity. But it's
also hard to believe that the chance to give it away is a major motive
for earning it in the first place. And if billionaires do earn it
primarily to give it away, that itself would require a special economic
theory just for them, different from the one that explains the rest of
us.

Um, fine. So is Kinsley about to apply the same "economic theory" to
billionaires as he would to the rest of us?

Dream on.

The prevalent theory of billionaire behavior is that it's a matter of
keeping score. Billionaire investor Carl Icahn recently told Ken Auletta
of the New Yorker, "I enjoy winning and making money." Keynes meant
something similar when he used the term "animal spirits."

Yes. Immediately after denying that there should be
a "special economic theory" for billionaires, Kinsley is now
explicating a "theory of billionaire behavior."

Never mind because we're about to come to the real point:

Okay, fine. But if it's all about winning, wouldn't (say) half as much
money be just as much winning -- as long as everybody else in the game
had half as much money as well? If Icahn is right, a stiff tax on
billionaires ought to have no effect on the fragile incentive structures
of billionaires, as long as it is applied to all billionaires equally.
I'm not advocating such a tax. I am, though, suggesting that the
exquisite sensitivity to the incentives of rich people that dominates
our tax policy may be overwrought.

After 900-some words, it's all about taking their money away. Kinsley,
based on an offhand comment from one gigabuccaneer, is ready to decree
that a 50% wealth tax on billionaires wouldn't alter their
incentives much. Maybe. Although he's not advocating that.

Everything You Know Is Wrong, Part CXVII

Good news: they're making piggies with high levels of
Omega 3 fatty acids. I'm thinking: Mrs. Salad will someday
be able to replace those salmon filets with pork chops. A couple
strips of bacon every day to replace the fish oil capsules. Not bad!

The finding, if confirmed, will place fish oils at the top of the list
of medical shibboleths that turned out to be myths. Among them are
claims that fibre can prevent bowel cancer, vitamin C can halt colds,
spinal manipulation can cure back pain, tranquillisers can cure anxiety
and removing tonsils can prevent throat infections.

Dr. Melik:
[puzzling over list of items sold at Miles' old
health-food store] ... wheat germ, organic honey and... tiger's
milk.
Dr. Aragon:
Oh, yes. Those are the charmed substances that some years ago were
thought to contain life-preserving properties.
Dr. Melik:
You mean there was no deep fat? No steak or cream pies or... hot fudge?
Dr. Aragon:
[chuckling] Those were thought to be unhealthy...
precisely the opposite of what we now know to be true.
Dr. Melik:
Incredible!

Eyewitness

This is a rerun of a fondly-remembered mystery-thriller
flick from a quarter-century ago.
You can see Sigourney Weaver, William Hurt, and Pamela Reed near
the beginning of their movie careers.
The script is full of
rare quirkiness, but never feels forced. Sure, Sigourney
Weaver is a TV newscaster on whom William Hurt is crushing, and also
just happens to be engaged to … oops, sorry, no spoilers
here.

Steven Hill and Morgan Freeman play world-weary but diligent detectives.
James Woods is great as Aldo; Hill's character observes "When he was a
kid, Aldo
must have wanted to be a suspect when he grew up." One of the all-time
great movie lines.

Seeing a "test page" in your web wanderings isn't exactly uncommon.
Here's one on this machine: /.
Which simply means I'm too lazy and uncreative to put anything there.
And here's
a similar one you get with the CentOS Linux distribution.

Simple, no big deal, right?
But there's probably nothing
on the web people cannot misunderstand and overreact to. Here's a hilarious
e-mail exchange between CentOS support and the City Manager of
Tuttle, Oklahoma. (Via LWN.)

Patterico examines
the proposed FEC regulations on political speech on the internet. He's
been consistent and principled on the issue at stake: a system under
which government regulators dole out "exemptions" and "exceptions" permitting
us to engage in political speech is odious, contemptible, and has
no place in a free society.

I unconscionably failed to take Patterico's pledge last year, but
will do it now:

If the FEC makes rules that limit my First Amendment right to
express my opinion on core political issues, I will not obey those
rules.

Of course, that's a pretty cheap pledge to make, given the minuscule
likelihood
of an FEC crackdown on Pun Salad. Nevertheless, there it is.

And back
in January, I fearlessly predicted that the Google would return
around 500 hits for the phrase "Oprahfication
of America" around now. Instead it gives "about"
257 hits (as I type), up a whole 13 hits from two months ago.
I think we're looking at (at best) a Stagnant Meme here.
Remember this, should you ever be tempted to rely on Pun Salad for
social prognostication.

Lazy Muncie Revisited

Everyone see Lazy Muncie?
(A URL du Yesterday, and also linked to by a pile of other folks.)
OK, we're up to speed.

Mickey Kaus
doesn't make a big deal about it, but
points to an article
in Muncie's Star Press newspaper that discusses the background
behind the video. It effectively debunks the thesis developed
by Rob
Long (and quoted by Mickey):

So what does it say if you're Lorne Michaels -- the guy who runs
Saturday Night Live -- or, for that matter, the head of comedy
development for pretty much any network -- and it turns out there are
two funny guys in Muncie who don't really need you to give them
permission to make a funny little movie because You Tube is their
network …

Too good to be true, unfortunately.
The newspaper story makes it clear that it's not
"two funny guys in Muncie"; it's an established TV writer/producer
from LA
(but who lived in Muncie until he was nine)
Chris Cox,
and a professional actor, (originally from Wyoming) Kirby Heyborne.

It's still fun, and part of the charm of the video is that
the guys really do look like they could be two funny guys from
Muncie.
But it's not quite an Army of Davids case study.

Wedding Crashers

As usual, I'm probably the last person on the planet to see
this movie. But on the off chance you haven't: it's very funny,
and has an inventive premise, which is adequately captured
in the title.

Aside from the premise, it's pretty predictable. All these
movies have the point where things are going swimmingly, then
it all comes crashing down around our heroes, seemingly irretrievably.
It's here too! Old dotty person saying outrageous things? Check!
Heroine cannot detect that her boyfriend is a horse's patoot,
a fact obvious to everyone else? Check!

Nevertheless, things are still fun to watch even when you see them
coming.

URLs du Jour

Constrained Katie offers a cold shower of reality
to those of us with sentimental
thoughts of college debating teams
issuing careful and nuanced deliberation of
all sides of an issue.

The phrase "high school debate camps" appears, which
I found mind-bending. Those must be the kids not cool enough
to go to band camp?

Another Paul at Power Line notes and debunks
what he terms a modified strategy for the Democrats: don't attack
Bush's policies, instead constantly whinge about Bush's
"incompetence."

Paul has a long memory, so he properly recollects back to Mike Dukakis
claiming "What matters, my friends, is competence, not ideology" when
he ran against George HW Bush in 1988. That didn't work out too
well for him.

Dr. Helen lacks
sympathy for Affirmative Actioneers who find that the game
can be played to the detriment of their daughters. (Via who else?)

Vermont Geezerhood II

A couple weeks back,
I posted
about a March 4 New York Timesarticle concerning
Vermont's current and future demographic woes (now behind the
TimesSelect wall).

Most of my comments still apply, but I should correct the following:

Another statistic reported by the NYT is the Census Bureau's projection
of state population trends until 2030. Which, as near as I can tell,
they managed to get wrong. They claim 30.4% of Vermont's population will
be 65 or older in 2030; in contrast (they claim) 25.7% of the US's
population will be 65 or older then.

But the Census Bureau's spreadsheet (Excel, sorry) puts these values at
24.4% for Vermont, and 19.7% for the US. Vermont's projected to be the
eighth "oldest" state in 2030.

I read this too quickly. The percentages reported by the NYT
were percentages of the adult population, not the total
population. And it's easy to do the calculation from this
Census
Bureau spreadsheet
to reproduce the values reported by the NYT. My bad.

However, as long as I was exercising my long-defunct
spreadsheet skills, I did the calculation for all the states (plus DC).
It turns out that while 30.4% of Vermont adults are projected to be
over 65 in 2030, that number is 33.9% for Florida. And seven
other states are projected to have higher percentages of
over-65 adults than Vermont (specifically: New Mexico, Wyoming, Maine,
Montana, North and South Dakota, and West Virginia).
(The number for New Hampshire is 27.3%)

So, while Vermont's
projected to be significantly older than the US average in the near
future (at least by this measure),
they're hardly unique.

Credit for this correction goes to Renee Murawski at the NYT
who politely pointed out my error after I badgered the Public Editor.

However, the original NYT article also contained this:

While Vermont's population of young people shrinks, the number of older
residents is multiplying because Vermont increasingly attracts retirees
from other states. It is now the second-oldest state, behind Maine.

My comment in the original posting:

According to the Census Bureau, the "oldest" state in the 2000 Census
was (of course) Florida, with 17.6% of its population over 65. Maine was
12th (14.4%) and Vermont was in 31st place (12.7%). I doubt things
changed that much in 6 years.

Regarding your disputing Vermont's ranking as the second-oldest
state, behind Maine, there are indeed several ways to measure
"oldness.'' Pam Belluck, who wrote the article, says that median
age, which is what the article used, is commonly used by demographers
and
state officials to describe how old a state is. Median age is used
because
it shows how the age of a state's population is changing by looking at
the
mix of young and old, not just the number of old people.

Also very polite, but in this case I think I'm correct. Or, more
precisely, more correct than the NYT. You can
find numbers that seem to corroborate the NYThere.
It reports Maine and Vermont at the top of the median-age pile,
with 40.2 and 40.1 years respectively; Florida is down at 39.1.

But at the head of that page (in not particularly fine print) is:

NOTE. Data are limited to the household population and exclude the
population living in institutions, college dormitories, and other group
quarters.

If you look here
instead, a table that doesn't contain that caveat, you'll find median
age data more in line with, um, the reality of the entire population.
This has Vermont with merely
the fifth-highest median age, behind West Virginia, Florida, Maine,
and Pennsylvania.

When I pointed this out to Ms. Murawski, she e-mailed back: "I think
we'll have agree to disagree on median age." Uh, fine, I guesss.
But the flat statement that Vermont is the "second-oldest state" is
true only by tortured cherry-picking. I think the article's author
was stretching to find stats that would support her case that Vermont's
situation is unique and dire.

So: one cheer, one raspberry for the NYT. Considering
my own mistake, we'll
call it a draw. And considering the NYT's other
current credibility problems, this one is pretty minor.

Arnold Kling, Blog Hero Du Jour

The latest example is Arnold
Kling, who debunks a WaPoop-ed
from Harold Meyerson, in a particularly easy and gratifying way:
Meyerson quoted an article
by Princeton economist Alan Blinder in support of his thesis. Arnold
retrieved Blinder's article and points out what
Meyerson left out: Blinder's actual conclusions, which were pretty
much the opposite of Meyerson's.

Noam Chomsky on Wealth Inequality

Yet Another Good Movie Unmade

Via Galley Slaves,
a pointer to a description of a Star Trek movie set during
the era when Kirk and Spock went to Starfleet Academy.

Spoilers galore, but since this movie is off the front burner, also the back
burner, and probably out of the kitchen entirely, you won't almost
certainly won't spoil
anything. Here's a line where McCoy is asked by starstruck
cadets whether Kirk and
Spock were friends at the Academy:

FRIENDS? I never met two less likely candidates for friendship in my
entire life. That surprises you, doesn't it? Well, it's the gospel
truth. They were as different as night and day. As Vulcan … and
Iowa.

Added Phi Beta
Cons, a group blog covering higher education issues, also based
at NR.

Added the infidel Treacher,
because I was not getting enough drug-induced humor, 90% of which I
don't even understand.

Added Carl Schaad's new
blog. Now freed from the cold corporate shackles of the Accuweather site,
Carl is finally able to freely
engage in his own brand of humor. Like those dog
whistles, the humor may only be detectable by those of Scandinavian
descent.

Finally, added WitNit, because he's a Richard
Mitchell fan. Good enough for me.

Fedora Core 5 Woes

Upgrading this server from Fedora Core 4 to 5 went unsmoothly.
Sorry if you noticed the long outage.

The CDs I burned failed the initial media check.
Impossible! A quick check of the Google showed
the magic words to type at the boot prompt: linux ide=nodma. This
caused the media check to pass and allowed us to proceed.

No surprises for the actual upgrade, except that it was
verrrrry slllow. I assumed this was due to extra careful
error checking, although I have no actual idea. The FC5 install
screens are pretty.

Finally, we reboot to the upgraded OS. And things look just
swell, except …

Crap, the network isn't working at all. Output from
ifconfig shows that the system thinks the interface
is up, but there are a lot of errors on the transmit and receive
sides.

After dinking around with network configuration tools, I try
unplugging the ethernet connector from the NIC, and plugging it back
in. Hallelulah, things work again! … for about a minute, then
we're back in Suck City.

Desperate, I'm thinking there's something wrong with the new network
card driver. This is a pretty generic box, a Dell Dimension 4500 with
a Davicom chipset ethernet card (CNET Pro200WL). How bad could that
be? Nevertheless, I scrounge from our local hardware guru a couple
more ethernet cards, one 3Com-based, one Intel-based.

Surely if anything's gonna work, the 3Com card will. Nope. If
anything, it's worse than the Davicom, because unplugging and plugging
doesn't even make it work for a minute.

OK, try the Intel card … Yah, we're back now. After about
7 hours of being off the network. Feh.

Was that painful enough for you? I have no idea why the other
cards aren't working, they're pretty standard. Experimentation
may cause further outages over the next few days. I don't think I
can recommend this upgrade for non-geeks.

Joel Achenbach is Funny

Joel Achenbach does us the favor of reproducing a few paragraphs
from his speech to the National Space Club last week. It's Dave
Barry-level funny. Excerpt from the intro:

I dread public speaking, and sometimes get a bit jittery even when I'm
just mumbling to myself in the car on the way to work. Anyway, there
were 2,500 people in attendance, though I couldn't see anyone in the
audience once they beamed the bright lights at the podium. To calm
myself, I pretended I was speaking to only 1,750. …

My basic attitude toward religion is a deeply confused sort-of-agnosticism
(I know, you
didn't ask, but if I waited for people to ask before blogging,
I wouldn't be blogging at all.) I don't go to church,
but, on the other hand, I don't want to make the baby Jesus cry.

When I read Dennett's Freedom Evolves, I found arguments at the
beginning of the book tight and basically convincing; later chapters
looked to be full of garrulous handwaving. McGrath is more polite than I, but
seems to be seeing the same thing.

McGrath is also very hard on the concept of "memes". As one who's
probably used the word too much in the past, I'm appropriately
chastened. Please read past posts that contain the word "meme"
in an informal, unscientific, and perhaps ironic sense.

Prof Volokh on the Slippery Slope

Speaking of slippery slopes (and I was, see below),
Prof Volokh has a good
article on a slippery-slope argument seen in
a recent court decision involving the Google.
It is notable for a great illustration
of the following
caption:

Camel (A) sticks his nose under the tent (B), which collapses, driving
the thin end of the wedge (C) to cause monkey to open floodgates (D),
letting water flow down the slippery slope (E) to irrigate acorn (F)
which grows into oak (G).

The Right Not to be Offended … by Amazon

You've probably noticed that search engines like Google's and Amazon's
offer alternate searches in case you've misspelled a word
you've entered. It's extremely useful for us fumble-fingered typists
and poor spellers. Amazon also adds a bit of commercialism to the
algorithm:
if a significant fraction of users search for "B" after searching for
"A", they'll eventually offer up "B" as an alternate for people
searching for "A".

Sometimes that doesn't work out too well, when the folks perusing your
site are of a certain obsessive persuasion. From the
NYT
today:

Until a few days ago, a search of Amazon's catalog of books using the
word "abortion" turned up pages with the question, "Did you mean
adoption?" at the top, followed by a list of books related to abortion.

Gasp! Outrageous! Obviously, this can not stand!

Amazon removed that question from the search results page after it
received a complaint from a member of the Religious Coalition for
Reproductive Choice, a national organization based in Washington.

One complaint, and Amazon leaps into action! Because people who
search on the word "abortion" shouldn't be forced to see
the word "adoption"! It's insensitive. Or something.

The "Religious Coalition for
Reproductive Choice" has its website here.
And, true enough, you'll see "Pro-faith", "Pro-family", and "Pro-choice"
on that page, but the word "adoption" is nowhere to be seen. It does
show up (for example) on their FAQ, where they
claim to be for it.

Or rather they're equally open to you choosing it. "Whatever!"

Unless, apparently, you happen to see it on an Amazon search page.

Because that's bad:

"I thought it was offensive," said the Rev. James Lewis, a retired
Episcopalian minister in Charleston, W.Va. "It represented an editorial
position on their part."

Perfect. Censorship demanded by religious fanatics. Gee, we've never
seen that before.

Of course, Amazon has a lame excuse, which also has the
minor advantage of absolute truth:

Patty Smith, an Amazon spokeswoman, said there was no intent by the
company to offer biased search results. She said the question "Did you
mean adoption?" was an automated response based on past customer
behavior combined with the site's spelling correction technology.

She said Amazon's software suggested adoption-related sources because
"abortion" and "adoption" have similar spellings, and because many past
customers who have searched for "abortion" have also searched for
"adoption."

A million geeks think at this point: Duh!

Ms. Smith said the "Did you mean adoption?" prompt had been disabled.
(It is not known how often searches on the site turn up any kind of "Did
you mean..." prompt.)

Amazon, of course, is free to do whatever it wants with its
search engine. Including putting a bold magenta notice on it: "Offended
by something you see?
Let us know, we'll disable it! We're huge wusses!"

But the reactionary forces still are rearing their ugly heads:

Customers, however, are still offered "adoption" as a possibility in the
Related Searches line at the top of an "abortion" search results page.
But the reverse is not true.

That's the way it works for me, I just checked.
And why is that?

Ms. Smith said that was because many customers who searched for abortion
also searched for adoption, but customers who searched for "adoption"
did not typically search for topics related to abortion.

Apparently, Amazon is going to continue making automatic related
searches available based on the actual search patterns of
its customers, without second-guessing the politics involved. One
cheer for Amazon.

But the folks at RCRC are still a little miffed.

Still, the Rev. Jeff Briere, a minister with the Unitarian Universalist
Church in Chattanooga, Tenn., and a member of the abortion rights
coalition, said he was worried about an anti-abortion slant in the books
Amazon recommended and in the "pro-life" and "adoption" related topic
links.

Anyway, if Jeff is "worried" about an "anti-abortion" slant
when looking at "pro-life" books on Amazon, then I think … well,
he must be worried all the time about just about
everything. (Jeff, when you search for "vampires", you're
going to see some references to fangs and blood. Just letting you
know ahead of time.)

"The search engine results I am presented with, their suggestions, seem
to be pro-life in orientation," Mr. Briere said. He also said he
objected to a Yellow Pages advertisement for an anti-abortion
organization in his city that appeared next to the search results,
apparently linked by his address.

Jeff would prefer that he lead his life sheltered from
"pro-life" suggestions and advertisements. His is a delicate soul,
apparently.

Or is he really more worried that other people might be
exposed to such suggestions and advertisements? Maybe. Unitarians,
in my experience, are pretty much "that's cool" type
folks, but apparently pro-life suggestions and advertisements are
enough to turn them into censorious Ayatollahs.

Web software that tracks customers' purchases and searches makes it
possible for online stores to recommend items tailored to a specific
shopper's interests. Getting those personalized recommendations right
can mean significantly higher sales.

But getting it wrong can cause problems, and Amazon is not the first
company to find that automated online recommendations carry risks.

The "risks" seem to be that easily-offended
people, might see something that offends
them, and (ignorant of the technology involved) assume a political
motivation where none exists.
Certainly Amazon would prefer that not happen.

But (equally
certainly) if Amazon bows to pressure to tweak its search results
and sidebar ads in response to pressure groups,
it will find itself on a very slippery and steep slope.
Hope they keep that risk in mind, too.

The Americanization of Emily

Gosh, they don't make movies like this any more.

Black and white, that is. Don't be fooled by the DVD box.

I kind of remember watching this as a young 'un. Not as good as I
remembered.
Paddy Chayefsky wrote the screenplay, and it is oppressively
satirical, without actually managing to be funny.
Nobody ever told Paddy "show, don't tell." The action,
such as it is, only exists to support Paddy's dialog, and is
often inexplicable. Julie Andrews and James Garner fall in
love—why? James Coburn suddenly turns into a martinet—why?
Garner finds it necessary to "cure" Julie's mother of her denial
of her husband's death (in an unbelievably facile way)—why?

Although the movie the movie is tediously pacifistic, the horror
of war is kept safely off screen. We only see one guy
killed at Omaha Beach, and that turns out to be a mistake.

If you have to watch one 1964 B&W satirical anti-war movie, though,
this would be a good bet. Oh, wait…

The Legend of Zorro

This sequel to The Mask of Zorro was a box office flop
and a critical failure (25% on the Tomatometer.)
Allegedly set in 1850 California, the history is ludicrous.
And it's especially bad in comparison to the movie it's sequelizing,
which was great.

Still, it's dumb fun, as long as you don't think too hard about it.
Antonio Banderas and Catherine Zeta-Jones can still buckle their
swashes, the special effects were impressive. The kid playing their
son is not insufferable at all, and it was kind of amusing to see his
genetics go into play as he breaks out of his pampered aristocrat role.
Not an awful way to spend a couple hours.

I also spent some time watching the "Extras" disk from Star Trek:
Nemesis. Coincidentally, Stuard Baird was the director of that
movie, and was the editor on this one. Not that that matters, just
a coincidence. The main thing I noticed on the disk was the sheer amount
of thought and effort that goes into making even a mediocre movie.
I'm not sure that's what they wanted to convey.

Annie Agonistes

Annie Proulx wrote
on the Oscars for the UK's Guardian. Clearly, she
was disappointed that Brokeback Mountain (based on her original
story) lost out to Crash for Best Picture. But she was a totally
good sport about it:

And rumour has it that Lions Gate inundated the academy voters with DVD
copies of Trash - excuse me - Crash a few weeks before the ballot
deadline.

It's somehow refreshing to know that even a critically-acclaimed professional
author will occasionally write like a half-witty 14-year-old girl
in a tearful snit because of a perceived snub at her middle school.
("I can't believe Smellily and Lamy - excuse me - Emily and Amy
said that!")
I strongly recommend you check out Shawn Macomber for further analysis.

Getting Pedantic with Pinkerton

James Pinkerton has an important and insightful article
at Tech Central Station, part one of two, about the "crisis of
process." Boring as that sounds, the article deserves to be shoved
under the noses of the President, top executive-branch staff,
and each and every Congresscritter. Couldn't hurt, anyway.

[P]roblems of process inside the federal government are threatening not
only our national well-being, but also our national security. …
[We] will remind conservatives and free-marketeers, who like
to affect a nonchalant disdain of government - even when they are
running the government - of the following reality: Nobody makes you
run for elective office. But if you want to hold high office, then you
have to take that office seriously. If you are in the government, you
have to govern. And that means, either make the existing system work,
or else bring forth a better system. What you can't do is pretend that
it's someone else's problem. The buck stops with you.

Excellent point. The devil's in the details, however.
For example,
I'll quibble with the following:

Six months after Katrina, nobody will argue that FEMA handled the storm
well. The only question is: who, what, and who else is to blame?

Well, actually someone does argue that FEMA did a pretty good
job. Here's an excerpt from Popular Mechanics' take on it:

[T]he response to Hurricane Katrina was by far the largest--and
fastest-rescue effort in U.S. history, with nearly 100,000 emergency
personnel arriving on the scene within three days of the storm's
landfall. …
While the press focused on FEMA's shortcomings, this broad array of
local, state and national responders pulled off an extraordinary
success--especially given the huge area devastated by the storm.
Computer simulations of a Katrina-strength hurricane had estimated a
worst-case-scenario death toll of more than 60,000 people in Louisiana.
The actual number was 1077 in that state.

While it's easy to imagine that FEMA could have handled things
better (and PM mentions "Bumbling by top disaster-management
officials"—it's not as if they have their heads under a basket),
painting the problem as a "process" catastrophe
to be laid solely at FEMA's door doesn't work for me.

Similarly, when Pinkerton claims:

… Uncle Sam can't actually run the schools, but the feds can set in place
a system of carrots and sticks to make sure that kids get the education
they need—and America gets the competitive workforce it needs.

… the skeptic in me says: where's the evidence that the feds can
actually do that? (As opposed to what they claim they can do, or
what they would like to be perceived as doing?)
Where's the evidence that they won't simply be pushing
on one end of a long string, in a vain attempt to get the other end
to move?
It doesn't
exist, I fear.

Pinkerton points to a long string of Presidential
education promises, going back decades. He points out the
dismal lack of results. He fails, however, to draw the
straightforward conclusion. I don't get it.

Mail from Walter Soehnge II

FYI, my name was an answer to a trivia question on NPR's "Wait, Wait,
Don't Tell Me!" My cousin, in Austin heard it and told me about it. I
do not know if the program is national or local. The only other thing
is that GE Financial has requested that the 'Providence Journal' print
retraction of the Bob Kerr article. The last I heard, they were not so
inclined.

I restate that J C Penny MasterCard (owned by GE Financial) told me via
Jim Ulseth that no personal or financial information was given to any
branch of the Federal Government. However, several people prior to my
speaking to him did say that. We only had voices on the phone. Which
voice does one believe when you're thinking "WHAT"!?!?

I still hold that JCPMC is constrained under some part of The Banking
Secrecy Act, 31 U.S.C. 5312 (a) (2) (A) through (X) to do what they did.
And, until I can prove to myself or until some one can prove to me they
didn't, I will continue to believe it. There is no more information
stating the act doesn't constrain JCPMC and others than there is stating
it does. On that point, we will have to disagree as it seems you hold a
dissimilar opinion. That's okay though. The debate was what I wanted
to happen. In the beginning of this issue (may be non-issue), I had
three goals. The first is stated in the article I am responding to.
Second, motive others to stand up and be counted, not to go around
mumbling and grumbling and whining when something is believed wrong.
Third, is to shout that 'we the people' have been sluggish long enough.
We must assume a much more vigorous role in the governance of our
country; use pen and paper, the telephone, work in the elections and use
the ballot box. Two and three are intertwined.

I have corrections to my document; one a typo, two and others are a
misheard name while the third was a bonehead. First, (see 03/08 or
03/09/06 and 03/10/06 p2) the name is Jim Ulseth. Then, (see 03/10/06
Jim Allsup (a well spoken professional)... the second bullet should end
with the words seven people. The bonehead was thinking that Fitzgerald
had contacted a spokesman for JCPMC and that Ulseth (Allsup) was he. I
thank you for bringing that to my attention.

I've made the indicated changes in yesterday's post. Comments:

I think it's clear that Walter is an extremely decent
fellow.

He's received contradictory information from JCPenney about
whether his transaction was reported to the Feds or not. It seems
that the more definitive source, Ulseth, says that it wasn't.

Hence, even more doubtful is that what happened is related to a terrorism
investigation under the Patriot act.

All of the MSM coverage, and most of the coverage on the web
assumes a certainty on these points that just isn't warranted.

But irrespective of what happened in this particular case, I think
it's clear that there is a privacy problem with financial information.
I've previously pointed out this article
originally from the Wall Street Journal, beginning:

The government's use of the Patriot Act to force financial institutions
to report suspicious transactions has resulted in an avalanche of
unwanted paper and computer tapes that officials who collect the data
say is undermining efforts to detect money flowing to terrorists.

… so even the Feds say that the amount of data they're getting
on unusual but innocuous transactions is hindering rather than
helping terrorism investigations. I think both Walter and I, with
all reasonable people, agree that this is idiotic and offensive.

URLs du Jour

2006-03-16

Haven't done one of these lately …

I argued yesterday against Alan Greenspan's
(hedged) claim that a growing wage gap between high- and low-skilled
workers might (among other things) fuel demand for "misguided
economic policies". Serendipitously, Bryan Caplan today reports
on a paper that tends to support my end of that disagreement.

Low-skilled workers are more opposed to immigration because they are
less economically literate, not because they selfishly calculate that
immigration is especially bad for their pocketbooks

In another matter discussed here a
couple days back, John Fund reports
that
Yale has suspended Alexis Surovov, who sent abusive, anonymous
e-mail to two alumni
organizing the protest against the admission of a former
Taliban official. Meanwhile, Anne Morse announces that
she's significantly culled the list of schools to which her son
will be applying. It's gone from "any school" to "any school but Yale."

I would guess that a significant fraction of Pun Salad readers
would want to read an article containing:

Sleepy Hollow

We'd missed this 1999 movie back when it came out, and never
managed to rent it before. But I suspect Mrs. Salad kind of has
a Thing for Johnny Depp, because when she was browsing around
the video store a few months back, she noticed his brooding
visage staring from the wall, and asked me to put this movie
in the Blockbuster queue.

So I did, we got it, and she wound up sleeping through the
last hour.

I liked it a bit more than that. Johnny Depp plays Ichabod Crane
as kind of a proto-geek, and the script otherwise takes considerable
liberties with the Washingon Irving yarn, turning it into
a supernatural detective story. IMDB reports that
18 people are decapitated in the movie, so be forewarned.
Tim Burton directs, which just about always means that the movie is full
of amusing sights and scenes. And, for some reason, he always attracts
some great actors. Besides Johnny, there's Christina Ricci, Christopher
Walken, Christopher Lee, Michael Gambon. And … who is
that guy? … oh, yeah, the Emperor from Star Wars.

Looking Harder at Greenspan on Inequality

In previous posts
(here,
here,
here,
here,
here,
here)
I think I've at least convinced myself that "inequality" as currently
discussed is (at least) two different "problems", each spurred
by different and incompatible visions. The first, exemplified by
Paul Krugman, et. al. is all about the very tippy-top of the
income/wealth distribution: one percent of the population or less. This
view is seemingly fueled entirely by resentment of the "rich",
relies on fallacies
for argument, and can't point convincingly to any specific social ills
caused by having a relative handful
of people at high income levels. Adherents offer no
"solution" other than taking (more of) the income/wealth of "the rich"
via taxation. This is often termed "redistribution", but generally
there's more interest in the taking part; the arguments showing how
"redistribution" will help the non-"rich" are weak to
non-existent.

The second vision is typified by Alan Greenspan's Senate
testimony last year. I briefly discussed the testimony a couple
days back,
mainly to argue that Krugman (et. al.) took Greenspan's
"inequality" concerns
out of context to bless their vision. But I'd like to look at
Greenspan's comments on their own here.

[F]or the past twenty
years, the supply of skilled, particularly highly skilled, workers has
failed to keep up with a persistent rise in the demand for such skills.
Conversely, the demand for lesser-skilled workers has declined,
especially in response to growing international competition. The failure
of our society to enhance the skills of a significant segment of our
workforce has left a disproportionate share with lesser skills. The
effect, of course, is to widen the wage gap between the skilled and the
lesser skilled.

Greenspan makes it clear (well, as clear as he ever does) that
his vision of the "inequality" problem is about large population segments,
not a mere percent or fraction thereof.

In a democratic society, such a stark bifurcation of wealth and income
trends among large segments of the population can fuel resentment and
political polarization. These social developments can lead to political
clashes and misguided economic policies that work to the detriment of
the economy and society as a whole.

This is superficially reasonable, especially given the tentative
phrasing about what "can" happen. But (wait a minute, Al), are
we really seeing that much resentment now? Dan Drezner
says "there is surprisingly little grumbling about [about
inequality]
within the mainstream political discourse". This repeats a point he
made nearly three years
ago, where he drew supporting arguments from David Brooks
(here
and here).

How about political polarization? Everyone says there's a lot of these
days; is it due to the wage gap between high- and low-skilled workers?
I think that's a tough argument to make. For example, here's a
Brookings Institution "Policy Brief" by Pietro Nivola
that examines a number of likely
causes of current polarization; economic factors don't make his list.

Are "misguided economic policies" in the offing as a result of
inequality? Professor Drezner mentions
protectionism as a possible candidate. Fine; but
I'd tend to vote for simple
xenophobia as a more likely cause of increased protectionist
sentiment over inequality.

So I don't find Greenspan's claims for the baleful effects of the
wage gap too convincing. But that's OK; surely a workforce which
(on average) is skilled below its potential is a Bad Thing on its face;
we don't really need to make indirect arguments about its further
effects on resentment, polarization, etc.

So how to fix that? Greenspan again:

[S]trengthening elementary and secondary schooling in the United
States--especially in the core disciplines of math, science, and written
and verbal communications--is one crucial element in avoiding such
outcomes. We need to reduce the relative excess of lesser-skilled
workers and enhance the number of skilled workers by expediting the
acquisition of skills by all students, both through formal education and
on-the-job training.

Appealing to improved education is an obvious choice. It's a no-brainer!
(Heh.)
Krugman,
however, is
scornful about this sort of thing:

The notion that it's all about returns to education suggests that nobody
is to blame for rising inequality, that it's just a case of supply and
demand at work. And it also suggests that the way to mitigate inequality
is to improve our educational system - and better education is a value
to which just about every politician in America pays at least lip
service.

In short: if there's nobody to blame, and it can't be used
as a partisan issue, I'm not very interested!

For more reasonable folks,
Greenspan's education solution is at least better than
redistributionist schemes. In a certain sense, we "know"
how to teach skills to willing learners. And all we have
to do is to implement that through the current schooling
system. Easy!

But it's not a quick fix, is it? Years elapse before
any additional educational magic at the elementary level works
its way into the workforce.

My guess would be that plain old market forces would be
a better bet than yet another educational reform. Not very
sexy. The most efficacious role for the
state might be simple and similarly non-sexy: to get out of the way.

Mail from Walter Soehnge

I previously blogged about Walter Soehnge here and here;
it was widely alleged a few weeks back that his
$6,522 payment to his JCPenney Platinum MasterCard was
reported to the Department of Homeland Security because this payment
was "a certain percentage higher" than his normal payment. This became a
minor cause célèbre, as it was considered yet another
harbinger of the impending long fascist night in Bush's Amerikkka.
I was skeptical.

Mr. Soehnge has sent me mail (and I have no reason to doubt
that it is Mr. Soehnge, not some hoaxster.) I'll reproduce it here, unedited
save for HTMLizing:

I am sending you this document because one of my friends read your site
and sent the link to me. The chronology and content are correct. I hope
the info clears up some things for you. Google hits have not been
checked since 10March06. Exercising what I considered to be a right;let
the genie out of the bottle. My very conservative friends think I am
unpatriotic. My liberal friends think I am a crusader for personal
freedoms. I thought I was saying, "Hey guys some unusual stuff is going
on out there. Be aware of it...get active...stand-up and be counted".
The Homeland Security/J C Penny MasterCard (JCPMC) Fiasco:
A Sequence of Events

01/17/06 -

Payment made on internet

01/20/06 -

Money cleared bank

01/25/06 -

Card refused and D'Anna is told by J C Penny MasterCard
(JCPMC):

(1st person spoken to) Check had to clear bank

(2nd person spoken to) Took 10 days or more before posting could
be done - both things had occurred

(3rd person spoken to) The reason was due to a Homeland Security
regulation(s). Customers were not notified so they could not find a way
around the regulation(s). (Latter and former responses to direct
questions)

01/28/06 -

D'Anna checks account via internet and speaks to three
persons by telephone at JCPMC

Balance marked paid

Credit limit/cash advance level same as before $6,520 payment

(3rd person spoken to) Reiterates that money is being held due
to Homeland Security regulation(s)

Money would be released in 10-14 days from date of payment

Would transfer to someone who would set her up with a different
account that she could use

Walter calls JCPMC offering them choice: give over
regulation(s) or the affair is put in the hands of an attorney.
Assurances are given JCPMC that money will not be the focus of any legal
action taken

03/10/06 -

Jim Ulseth (a well spoken professional) calls the Soehnge
home and says the following things

The seven persons referring to Homeland Security Regulation(s)
had misspoken

The problem was a misunderstanding on the part of those seven
people

An internal investigation was under way

Homeland Security had not been given any of our personal
information

JCPMC internal security decided the payment was suspicious

He would send a letter ("perhaps by registered mail") fully
explaining the issue

That our card was fully usable with maximum balances available

03/10/06

Walter reiterated that balance/availability was not the
issue. At issue was the Federal Government's interest in my finances and
whether JCPMC had given that information to some unregulated and
insidious bureaucracy.

Mr. Soehnge seems like a straight shooter, I've got no reason
to doubt his patriotism,
and I'm sure the above
account is accurate, at least within the usual uncertainties introduced
by recalling
the details of phone conversations after the fact.

But it's worth pointing out:

Absent is any actual statement that any information whatsoever
about the Soehnges or this transaction were provided by JCPenney
to the Department
of Homeland Security. (Or any other governmental agency, for
that matter.) At least one JCPenney spokesmodel denies that DHS
was given any "personal information."

Also absent is any indication
that this had anything to do with a terrorism
investigation. DHS (as seemingly few realize) is tasked
with emitting regulations and undertaking
investigations in the credit card crimes
area, even if they are non-terror related.

Also absent is any indication that this happened due to new regulations
issued under authorization of the Patriot Act.

I'm not saying that any of those things aren't
true, just that there seems to be remarkably little
support for the assumption
by so many
people in the MSM and on the Web that they are true.
See, for a reminder:
Andrew
Sullivan; J.
Francis Lehman; Bob
Kerr of the Providence Journal; Bruce
Schneier; and
Slashdot.

Also, for that matter, see the Boston
Herald story referred to in the timeline above.
The author, Jay Fitzgerald,
confidently states (without any supporting evidence provided)
that Mr. Soehnge's payment "set off an
anti-terrorism alarm." To his credit, Fitzgerald actually did some
calling. Oddly, instead of calling the DHS, he called the Department
of the Treasury. Their spokeswoman "could not verify Soehnge's
particular claims." Fitzgerald also called JCPenney and spoke to
a "spokeswoman", who is quoted only as saying "We're trying to figure out why
that happened." Missing, as usual, is any verification of what
specifically happened vis-a-vis reporting to DHS.

So I'm still skeptical. I've seen nothing to dissuade me from my
original notion that peoples' political preconceptions are causing them
to lower their shields, skepticism-wise.

But I've asked Mr. Soehnge to send along
any additional information he receives from JCPenney or anyone else.
And, if he does, you'll probably see it here.

Paul Graham on Inequality

One of the essays in Paul Graham's book Hackers and Painters
discusses the inequality issue, an issue much on Pun Salad's mind
lately.
(For example,
here,
here,
here,
here,
and
here.)
Graham's essay is
is a refreshing change from the usual arguments
seen from economists, philosophers, or political scientists.
I'll quote the first
four paragraphs:

When people care enough about something to do it well, those who
do it best tend to be far better than everyone else. There's a huge
gap between Leonardo and second-rate contemporaries like Borgognone.
You see the same gap between Raymond Chandler and the average writer of
detective novels. A top-ranked professional chess player could play ten
thousand games against an ordinary club player without losing once.

Like chess or painting or writing novels, making money is a very
specialized skill. But for some reason we treat this skill differently.
No one complains when a few people surpass all the rest at playing chess
or writing novels, but when a few people make more money than the rest,
we get editorials saying this is wrong.

Why? The pattern of variation seems no different from any other skill.
What causes people to react so strongly when the skill is making money?

I think there are three reasons we treat making money as different:
the misleading model of wealth we learn as children; the disreputable
way in which, till recently, most fortunes were accumulated; and the
worry that great variations in income are somehow bad for society.
As far as I can tell, the first is mistaken, the second outdated,
and the third empirically false. Could it be that, in a modern
democracy, variation in income is actually a sign of health?

Graham makes a good case, pleasantly free
of the sheen of apology
in a lot of defenses of inequality.
It makes (for example), Jacob Hacker's response
essay at the Cato Unbound online magazine look a bit limp, to my
mind.

Unfortunately, this essay is not one
that's available at his website,
so you'll have to pick up the book for the rest.
The website does contain a different essay on the topic,
also great, check it out.

Michigan vs. Yale in the Big Game

We recently remarked
on the efficacy of a Harvard education toward one's ability to give
nuanced and sophisticated commentary on current events. ("Censorship is
bad."—Natalie
Portman) Now comes one Alexis Surovov, Yale graduate, currently an advisor
to the Yale
Anglers Journal, and Assistant Director of the Annual
Giving Programs at Yale Law School.

Alexis was incensed at the recent
effort of Clinton Taylor urging protest of the
admission to Yale of one Sayeed Rahmatullah, Taliban official.
Specifically, Taylor suggested sending "glamorous, decadent,
shameless-hussy-scarlet press-on nails" to the Yale Development
Office and President as a reminder of the Taliban's policy of removing
the fingernails of women who ventured to wear fingernail polish.
(Or, sometimes, apparently not wanting to mess with the details
of fingernail removal, taking a whole thumb.)

What is wrong with you? Are you retarded? This is the most disgraceful
alumni article that I have ever read in my life. You failed to mention
that you've never contributed to the Yale Alumni Fund in your life. But
to suggest that others follow your negative example is disgusting.

Unfortunately, the e-mail was easily traced back to Alexis,
and now Yale has to deal with multiple embarrassments.

In contrast to the venerable realms of the Ivy League, one might
expect that the University of Michigan would show even less respect
to free expression. Via FIRE's Torch
blog, we have the results of that experiment,
as recounted by the editor in chief of
the student paper, The Michigan Daily.

The problem was a number of editorial cartoons printed in the paper:

The most controversial of these cartoons portrayed a high school
classroom full of dark-skinned students and one white student. At the
front of the classroom, a black teacher tells the class that they can
all expect special preferences when applying to college - except for
Bob, the lone white student.

Somewhat predictably:

Student leaders, arguing that the cartoon was "objectively racist,"
demanded retractions and printed apologies. Later, a committee of the
University's faculty senate even argued that it was potentially illegal
- that the caricature of "an institutional policy favoring diversity"
could, by encouraging a "racially hostile learning environment," violate
federal equal-protection laws.

Some student newspapers when confronted with such a situation
fold like a sleeping fruitbat. (Many more avoid such situations
in the first place by avoiding content likely to cause such
a response.) Fortunately, the editor has a spine:

In the interest of free debate, the Daily will continue to print
cartoons that may occasionally offend you. That's an inevitable part of
being a newspaper, and a campus newspaper especially should be a place
where ideas are exchanged freely. It would be much easier for us to
simply pull all cartoons that are potentially offensive, but we would be
doing the campus a disservice.

Read the whole thing, it's an eloquent defense of free expression
on the campus. It's especially recommended to readers at Harvard
and Yale.

Hackers and Painters

Subtitled "Big Ideas from the Computer Age," this book is a collection
of essays from Paul Graham. They are designed to appeal to computer
types who at least have pretensions to thinking about other things than
computers. They are well-written and provocative.

I'm personally indebted to Graham, since one of the essays included
here ("A Plan for Spam") was the springboard for Bogofilter, which
has helped reduce the time I spend on dealing with unwanted mail
by at least an order of magnitude. (That's a decimal order
of magnitude, in case geeks are reading.)

Other topics Graham ruminates on: the ecology of startup tech companies;
how to have heretical thoughts and survive;
why nerds are unpopular;
the superiority of Lisp over other computer languages;
the superiority of web-based over host-based applications.
And more.
Like all good essayists, Graham makes these interesting even
to people who might not be directly involved. If you want
to sample, many (maybe most, maybe all, I haven't checked)
of the essays are available on
his website.

He's convinced me that I should learn Lisp. Or, more precisely,
that I should have learned Lisp before my brain calcified
and made me impervious to such radical rewiring.

He also argues about inequality, a topic much covered
on this blog of late. I'll probably devote a separate post
to this later.

And I'm with Alan Greenspan, who - surprisingly, given his libertarian
roots - has repeatedly warned that growing inequality poses a threat to
"democratic society."

If you're like me, you're asking: "OK, what did Greenspan really
say?" Here
is a link to his testimony. This allows us (unlike
Boushey and Krugman) to put the comments about inequality
in context.

Greenspan is famous for delphic utterances that leave people
arguing about their import for months afterward. But here
he is utterly clear about what he thinks is the underlying problem:

Another critical long-run economic challenge facing the United States is
the need to ensure that our workforce is equipped with the requisite
skills to compete effectively in an environment of rapid technological
progress and global competition. … At the risk of some
oversimplification, if the skill composition of our workforce meshed
fully with the needs of our increasingly complex capital stock,
wage-skill differentials would be stable, and percentage changes in wage
rates would be the same for all job grades. But for the past twenty
years, the supply of skilled, particularly highly skilled, workers has
failed to keep up with a persistent rise in the demand for such skills.
Conversely, the demand for lesser-skilled workers has declined,
especially in response to growing international competition. The failure
of our society to enhance the skills of a significant segment of our
workforce has left a disproportionate share with lesser skills. The
effect, of course, is to widen the wage gap between the skilled and the
lesser skilled.

In a democratic society, such a stark bifurcation of wealth and income
trends among large segments of the population can fuel resentment and
political polarization. These social developments can lead to political
clashes and misguided economic policies that work to the detriment of
the economy and society as a whole.

Greenspan then provides his obvious solution:

As I have noted on previous occasions, strengthening elementary and
secondary schooling in the United States--especially in the core
disciplines of math, science, and written and verbal communications--is
one crucial element in avoiding such outcomes. We need to reduce the
relative excess of lesser-skilled workers and enhance the number of
skilled workers by expediting the acquisition of skills by all students,
both through formal education and on-the-job training.

I may (probably will) comment further on Greenspan's testimony,
but for now,
it's worth pointing out that Krugman is particularly shameless
about "quoting" Greenspan while actually in fervent disagreement
with his underlying thesis. His column was spurred by new Fed Chairman
Bernanke's comments essentially saying the same thing
as Greenspan:

Responding to a question from Representative Barney Frank about income
inequality, [Bernanke] declared that "the most important factor" in rising
inequality "is the rising skill premium, the increased return to
education."

Krugman is indignant:

That's a fundamental misreading of what's happening to American
society. What we're seeing isn't the rise of a fairly broad class
of knowledge workers. Instead, we're seeing the rise of a narrow
oligarchy: income and wealth are becoming increasingly concentrated
in the hands of a small, privileged elite.

So, really, Krugman (et. al.) and Greenspan/Bernanke are
really talking about different things, both called "inequality."
Confusing, no?

But it's intentionally confusing when Krugman and his ilk
dishonestly quote Greenspan in support of their thesis.
Greenspan's view of the "inequality problem" is "solved" by broad training
initiatives to put the skill distribution of the American workforce
more in line with demand. Roughly speaking: work on inequality by
shoring up the bottom side of the distribution.

Krugman's "inequality problem" (on the other hand) can't be solved
that way. Because even then, we'll still have that "small, privileged
elite" that so chaps his hide. (We will swallow, for now, the cognitive
dissonance involved in reading a NYT columnist
railing against a "small, privileged elite.")
Clearly the solution must
involve taking those other folks down a peg or two, or nineteen.

What do we do, specifically? Krugman
is typically coy, but ominous, writing: "It may take some time before we muster
the political will to counter that threat."

Krugman probably doesn't advocate countering the "threat" of
inequality by putting the Forbes 400
into
concentration camps or anything.
I would guess, if you pressed him, he'd
simply argue for confiscatory high
levels of taxation on income and wealth,
with appropriate "regulation" to insure that victims of this
legalized theft
high-income taxpayers can't escape avoid it.

Or perhaps the lack of a plan simply indicates that
all the "eat the rich" rhetoric about inequality
is just a cynically-designed
issue to inflame the populace, which they desperately hope
will help the Democrats win back
political power. When and if that happens, the issue will be
safely consigned to the memory hole.

Update: Welcome, AmSpecBlog readers, and humble thanks to Shawn Macomber for the link.

Mr. and Mrs. Smith

Another movie I'm getting around to seeing relatively belatedly; it
turns out I didn't miss that much.

The good: some clever dialog,
Vince Vaughn, and a pretty good score. (Maybe I should explain that
last: I hardly ever notice movie music, but here the music seemed to
fit in pretty well with what was happening on screen.)

(Late addition: I especially liked the line where Mr. Smith describes
Mrs. Smith's (imaginary) job as being "like Batman for computers."
That's a self-image I'd like to aspire to. Except that Batman gets
the crap kicked out of him every so often; I'd like to avoid that part.)

But I seem to have maxed out on cartoon violence,
where somehow the good guys manage to avoid getting shot in the
head, despite bullets flying thicker than flies at the dump.

March of the Penguins

I'm only just now getting around to seeing this good nature
documentary about how emperor penguins carry out their
lives in Antarctica. (If you haven't seen it: a lot of
walking is involved.)

The film's makers do a bang-up job of staying out of the picture.
It's easy to guess that they were a lot less comfortable
than the penguins during the shoot. (At least they weren't menaced
by seals and albatrosses.) I imagine they were tempted to
compare the penguins' hardships with their own; they let the
opportunity pass, fortunately.

However, it is just a nature documentary. Geez, it's not
like it's Citizen Kane or anything.

(Still) More on Inequality

Singer argues for egalitarian policies on a utilitarian basis. (Since
$100 is presumed to be more utile to a poor person than a rich one,
we can raise overall utility by taking it from the rich guy
and giving it to the poor person.)
That aspect of Singer's response is critiqued here
by "KipEsquire", who really disagreed.

Much better, in my view, is Palmer's article. He observes:

Most—perhaps all—of those who are intent on
eradicating inequalities of wealth, or income, or welfare start by
assuming that they are entitled to rearrange the lives and entitlements
of other people. It's just obvious to them that they have a legitimate
right to determine how other people live. Of course, they assume that
it's not "they" who have those rights; rather it's the state, which is
assumed to be their—er, our—agent, that has those rights.

Mr. Palmer then proceeds to blow this assumption out of the water
in masterful fashion.

But, as I observed before, it's Inequality Season, and Arnold
Kling has a good
article on the topic too. He asks a question I've often pondered
myself, on both this topic and others:

The question I have for people on both sides of the debate is this: what
would the data have to look like to get you to consider changing your
position? That is, if you think inequality is a big deal, what would the
data on relative consumption or wealth or income have to look like to
make you think it is not a big deal? Conversely, if you think inequality
is not a big deal, what would the data have to look like to make you
think that it is a big deal?

Since I quoted the question, I suppose I should attempt to answer
from the "not a big deal" side: I'm not so sure I can answer it in
a "data" sense, but in a policy sense: we have to worry when the
illiberal
political processes put up barriers to the dynamism that fuels
economic and social mobility. I'm not so much interested in what
the wealth or income distribution statistics "look like" as I am
in in having a free and prosperous country.

(Of course, this conveniently answers
the question in a way that avoids changing my position. Sorry,
Arnold.)

Via Arnold's article, you can also check out this debate
at the WSJ
site between lefty Heather Boushey and Cafe Hayek's Russell Roberts.
Not surprisingly, I think Russell has the better argument there. And
(finally), see Russell's co-blogger, Don Boudreaux, on the topic
at the Cafe.
Among the good points made there is a parenthetical one:

By the way, I put "distribution" in quotation marks because, as David
Henderson once reminded me, income and wealth in market economies aren't
"distributed" in any meaningful sense of that term; income and wealth
are created and initially owned by those who create it. Wealth isn't
created and then distributed. The pattern of wealth's possession is
determined by the process of its creation. Therefore, what we call
"redistribution" of wealth is really distribution of goods confiscated
mostly from their creators.)

HR 1606

If you get a chance, you might want to drop your Congresscritter
an e-note encouraging a "yes" vote for HR 1606, the "Online Freedom of
Speech Act". (Or, hey, this is America. If you feel differently,
encourage a "no" vote. You weasel.)

The idea
is simple enough: "to exclude communications over the Internet from the
definition of public communication" for purposes of McCain-Feingold
regulation. This was the status quo as recently
as the 2004 election. This bill, however, was made necessary by
a ruling from Federal judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, when she overturned
the exemption established by the FEC.

RedState is all over this in their FEC Section.
A good place to start is this recent
article at RedState by Brad Smith, an ex-FEC commissioner.
(Why, he gets so exercised, he even says "heck" at one point.)

I think, generally speaking, that restrictions on political
speech are a bad idea everywhere, not just on the internet.
But, given the judge's ruling, HR 1606 is a good start.

Scott Adams: Sick, Not Nuts

Scott Adams has a great
mini-essay on his recent medical adventure, involving his
inability to speak in some situations; it's an interesting
mix of humor and horror; perhaps it could be transmogrified into an
episode of House. Once he'd done the research to determine
his likely (but very rare) ailment:

Now all I had to do was convince my doctor(s) that I wasn't nuts and
that I had a very rare condition. As you might imagine, when you tell a
doctor that you think you have a very rare condition, that doctor will
tell you that it's very unlikely. Your first impulse might be to point
out that "very rare" is a lot like "very unlikely," but you don't do
that, because doctors have wide latitude in deciding which of your
orifices they will use for various medical apparati. So you go with the
protocol which involves systematically eliminating all the things that
are more likely.

I have some medical woes common to guys
of a Certain Age: a minor melanoma; cholesterol,
weight, and blood pressure all higher than they should be.
Reading Scott's essay made me grateful that
they are relatively common; at least I don't have to convince
the doctors that I have them.

UNH Relatively Safe from Dangerous Profs

Now (sorry, David), I'm mainly interested in one thing about the
book: did anyone from UNH make the list? And I hadn't been able
to find the list until today: graciously, WitNit
has done the compilation.

And the answer is… no, apparently nobody
from UNH is there. Rats. I thought
Marc Herold would have
had a shot.

And … nobody from Harvard. Nobody from Harvard? I think
this is rigged.

Good Movies You'll Never See

Eric Raymond proposes
eight movies that Hollywood would make "if it were really
brave". (Hence the title of this post.)

I'd probably be in line for the first-night premiere of The Moon Is A
Harsh Mistress, one of Eric's ideas.
Eric suggests Nicolas Cage for Manny, Mira Sorvino for
Wyoming Knott. I'll chime in with Robin Williams for the
voice of Mike. (Sorry if that would drive you crazy.)

Crystal Wosik Should Run For (Even) Higher Office

A recent American Spectator article by Max Schulz
discusses Crystal Wosik, the current Miss Nevada. This position put her
in the running for Miss America; that competition
was held in Ms. Wosik's home of Las Vegas.

The competition involves an interview with judges; Ms. Wosik's interview
was not
televised, but she was asked her opinion about the
plan to store radioactive waste at Yucca Mountain, 90 miles from
Las Vegas.

She said, reportedly, "It has to go someplace, and that was the
best-built facility in the country."

Apparently the judges then asked, well, what if people
die as a result?

Now, she could have retreated into simple-minded responses:
hem and haw, and say, well that would be bad for children, butterflies,
and flowers, sure hope that doesn't happen. You know: Miss America
stuff.

She could have also pointed out that
the probability of that happening is roughly comparable to that
of an alien attack against Area 51. She could have pointed
out that it's far more hazardous to not have a facility
for radioactive waste storage.

She could have also asked whether the judges were
asking what-if-people-die followups to all the contestants'
views on public policy issues. ("So, Miss Minnesota, you're in favor of
mandatory aluminum recycling? What if people die?")

But instead she granted the premise, didn't complain, didn't retreat
into happy-talk, and
(reportedly) said: "We just have to take one for the team."

Crystal didn't win anything at the pageant, except a place in the
heart of all admirers of courage and straight talk. (And apparently,
she's now getting threats from the usual
group of knuckle-draggers.) She should forego the beauty pageant stuff
and go into politics.

Schneier on Paying Off Your Credit Card Balance

Bruce Schneier blogs about the Rhode Island man who
alleges that his recent $6,522 payment to his JCPenney Platinum
MasterCard was reported to the Department of Homeland Security because
this payment was "a certain percentage higher" than his normal payment.
I discussed this last week
here.

Schneier's article is a mixture of good and bad, mostly good.
Unlike the original article reporting this, he manages to get the name
of the applicable law correct: the Bank Secrecy Act. He has pointers
to the way the legislation was amended by the Patriot Act.
He has pointers to a couple of excellent debunking
posts by Seth Finkelstein, which I'll relink: here
and here.

One of the commenters makes the observation that none of the statutes
and regulations Schneier links to in his article have anything to
do with the claimed facts; as near as I can tell, that's correct.
There's more than enough reason to be extremely skeptical
of the report.

Unfortunately, Schneier still feels that it's necessary to carp:

… certainly this kind of thing is what financial institutions are required
to report under the Patriot Act.

Remember, all the time spent chasing down silly false alarms is time
wasted. Finding terrorist plots is a signal-to-noise problem, and stuff
like this substantially decreases that ratio: it adds a lot of noise
without adding enough signal. It makes us less safe, because it makes
terrorist plots harder to find.

The ACLU said that it was only seven years ago that Congress amended the
Bank Secrecy Act to require that banks file so-called "suspicious
activity" reports, which banks must file whenever a transaction of
$5,000 or more is carried out by a customer.

Again, note carefully: the ACLU is talking in 1990
about a seven-year-old amendment to the BSA. Well
before the Patriot Act.

It's far from clear that this case (assuming that
it happened at all) was a "terrorism" investigation;
as Finkelstein points out, Homeland Security does criminal credit
card fraud investigations as well, and it's very probable that
this happened under that umbrella.

By pointing to terrorism and the Patriot Act, Schneier is almost
certainly doing some "chasing down" of "silly false alarms" of
his own. Again: if you want to raise the bar for reporting of
financial transactions to law enforcement agencies, that's fine by
me. But saying it's all due to the Patriot Act and terrorism
investigators gone wild is just wrong and lazy.

For a much, much worse example, see the recent Slashdot
article, which (unsurprisingly) is completely unskeptical of the
original report; the light/heat ratio of the hundreds of comments
is also quite low. (Maybe zero. Didn't read 'em all.)

(Even) More on Inequality

It seems to be Inequality Season out there. No sooner than
we post two articles on the issue (here and here), more good stuff pops
up on the web that's worth pointing out and commenting upon.

Max Borders at Tech Central Station posts on
(perhaps) a solution of the mystery of why (some) folks get so het up
about inequality: it's a combination of emotions hard-wired in
our brains left over from Stone Age tribal times. We simply are built
to feel (a) guilt for being more
fortunate than someone else; (b) envy, for being less fortunate
than someone else;
and, finally, (c) indignation when we, as third
parties, observe an inegalitarian situation between others.

These emotions are (the argument goes) appropriate for
small tribes struggling for survival against nature and other tribes.
The emotions become counterproductive, however,
as "society" grows larger than the
typical tribal unit.

So is that what's going on with inequality-phobes like Paul Krugman? Is
he just letting his old tribal emotions come to the fore, then dressing
them up afterward in language appropriate to the pages of the
New York Times? Hey, maybe.

Also beginning today at Cato Unbound is a more philosophical
take
on the issue. The link will take you to a "lead essay" from David
Schmidtz; reaction essays will soon follow.
Schmidtz's essay is dense but extremely sensible, I won't summarize
it here. I will quote one paragraph that effectively debunks the
oft-used athletic-race metaphor used by egalitarians:

In a race, equal opportunity matters. In a race, people need to start on
an equal footing. Why? Because a race's purpose is to measure relative
performance. Measuring relative performance, though, is not a society's
purpose. We form societies with the Joneses [as in: "keeping up with the
Joneses"] so that we may do well,
period, not so that we may do well relative to the Joneses. To do well,
period, people need a good footing, not an equal footing. No one needs
to win, so no one needs a fair chance to win. No one needs to keep up
with the Joneses, so no one needs a fair chance to keep up with the
Joneses. No one needs to put the Joneses in their place or to stop them
from pulling ahead. The Joneses are neighbors, not competitors.

It's interesting how easily a bad metaphor can corrupt further thought.
Using an athletic race as a metaphor for society is just one example.
So is using a pie as a metaphor for income or wealth distribution, for
that matter.

Kaus on Krugman

I commented on Paul Krugman's February 27 column on inequality
here.
Mickey Kaus reminds us why he is (unlike me) actually paid to do that
sort of
thing here.

Mickey wrote a book a number of years back titled The End of
Equality, which I've actually read; I was impressed at the time
at how refreshingly free of liberal cant it was. He did a great job
of arguing that social inequality was almost certainly
more worth worrying about than the raw economic inequality. He
resummarizes the thesis:

We're Americans--we don't mind people getting rich. We do mind richer
people lording it over less rich people, or even thinking they're better
than less rich people.

Exactly.
His book is very much
worth reading, if you can find it.

Mickey also
not-so-subtly recalls that Krugman was all for free-market wages
in the past, when it was his own wage in question.

Stalag 17

This is #182 on IMDB's top-250 list, and, to my mind,
utterly deserves to be there, or even higher. Even today, it's
an unusual blend of comedy and keen suspense drama. And the comedy
is a mix of broad mugging and subtle wit. Billy Wilder's involved.

Everybody's really good in this. William Holden (an Oscar-winning
performance) is the guy everyone else
hates, because he's a successful capitalist in the eponymous German POW
camp, and everyone suspects him of being a spy for the Krauts.
Except, of course,
the actual spy for the Krauts, who is … nah, if you
don't know, go rent it. Holden is able to turn the tables on the
bad guy in a very satisfying denouement.

The immortal Harvey Lembeck also turns in perhaps his finest
performance here. Otto Preminger, ditto.
And from IMDB:

The uncredited soldier singing at the Christmas Party is Ross
Bagdasarian, also known as 'Dave Seville' , the leader/creator/voice of
'Alvin and the Chipmunks'.

From the land of Howard Dean, Jim Jeffords, and Bernie Sanders: Young
people can't get out of Vermont fast enough, according to this
report.

Fair enough, but is it true? I'm not shy
about making invidious comparisons between my own beloved
New Hampshire and Vermont. For example, the difference
in Business
Tax Climate (NH is sixth-best, Vermont is #46) might have something to
do with this, since young folks tend to vacate states without jobs.
And surely the overall state
tax burden (Vermont is sixth-highest, NH is #49) might also
be a part of the explanation for the Vermontian exodus.

The NYT, unfortunately, wastes time on looking at
non-economic
explanations.
They point out, for example, that Vermont has the lowest birth rate
of all states. This report
from the National Center on Health Statistics confirms that; Vermont is
actually tied with Maine with a 10.6 birth rate. Utah has the highest
birth rate, 21.2. The US overall birth rate is 14.1

But New Hampshire has a 11.2 birth rate, only 0.6 above Vermont,
and 2.9 below the US rate. So why isn't the NYT writing about
New Hampshire?

We might as well also look at fertility rate,
since I took the time to look it up:
The NCHS deems the fertility rate to "provide a more refined
picture of geographic variation in childbearing."
And (indeed) Vermont has the lowest state
fertility rate: 51.1, compared to the US rate of 66.1. (Maine's
fertility rate is 52.1, Utah is highest with 92.2.)

New Hampshire, however, is right down there with Vermont and Maine, with
a fertility
rate of 52.7. (1.6 above Vermont, 13.4 below the US rate.)
So, again, why isn't the NYT reporting this about New
Hampshire?

Another statistic reported by the NYT
is the Census Bureau's projection
of state population trends until 2030. Which, as near as I can tell,
they
managed to get wrong. They claim 30.4% of
Vermont's population will be 65
or older in 2030; in contrast (they claim) 25.7% of the US's population
will be 65 or older then.

But the Census Bureau's spreadsheet
(Excel, sorry) puts these values at 24.4% for Vermont, and 19.7% for the
US. Vermont's projected to be the eighth "oldest" state in 2030. Maine,
in contrast, is projected to be second only to Florida in geezer
population (26.5%) in 2030. New Hampshire's projection is 21.4, which
puts it in a more comfortable 17th place. (Update: I misread
this,
and the NYT is actually correct. Please see here.)

The NYT also gets this wrong:

While Vermont's population of young people shrinks, the number of older
residents is multiplying because Vermont increasingly attracts retirees
from other states. It is now the second-oldest state, behind Maine.

According to the Census Bureau, the "oldest" state in the 2000 Census
was (of course) Florida, with 17.6% of its population over 65.
Maine was 12th (14.4%) and Vermont was in 31st place (12.7%). I doubt
things changed that much in 6 years.

What about total population? This is where you really
see a difference.
The Census Bureau expects
Vermont's population to grow by 16.9 percent between 2000 and 2030.
In comparison, the the US projected population
growth is 29.2%; NH's is 33.2%,
Maine's is (only) 10.7%. (North Dakota trails the pack with a projected 5.5%
drop in population, a neat trick considering nobody lives there
in the first place.)

How you feel about this mainly reflects how you feel about population
growth in the first place. But the easiest point of
comparison is that NH's population
is projected to grow significantly
above the national average, while Vermont's and
Maine's growth rates will be below-average.

So the NYT is mistaken to point to birth rate data to explain
Vermont's woes,
since New Hampshire is able to maintain (relatively) high population
growth with (similarly) low birth rates.

Speculation: what Vermont is seeing (and Maine, too) is the
inevitable result of anti-growth policies pursued
for years. They thought (with all "good intentions") that
they could limit
"growth" while somehow keeping other things, like a healthy population
of young folks, the same.

The NYT, to its credit, at least gingerly touches on such issues.
Young people can't afford housing, which is purchased by retirees
instead. Vermont voters are terrified of "overdevelopment", so place
onerous restrictions on new housing. And, finally, there's the
overriding issue:

Vermont has also lost many good-paying jobs, driving away many
well-educated young people and further discouraging businesses.

Of course, it is the New York Times, so
no mention is made of parasitic
levels of taxation
as a possible cause of "lost" jobs. The only mention of taxes
is the current governor
bewailing that that there won't be enough tax revenue in the future due to
people leaving.

The governor has also proposed "giving college scholarships requiring
students to stay in Vermont for three years after graduating".
I can imagine your average Vermont wigh school senior weighing (a)
a college
tuition break versus
(b) a real good chance at being unemployed for three years afterward.
Hm. Tough choice!

With any luck, New Hampshire will be able to continue
to look at Vermont as a
shining example of what not to do to maintain economic health.

The Feds Are Watching

Don't pay off your credit card debt in one big chunk, or Homeland
Security will be after
you.

The link goes to a blog entry of J. Francis Lehman, which is entitled
"That 'harmless' and 'neccessary' [sic] Patriot Act". Which
quotes in full a February 22 column written by one
Bob Kerr from the Providence (RI)
Journal. Kerr's column is titled "Pay too much and you could raise
the alarm".

Kerr writes about Walter Soehnge, who claims that his
recent $6,522 payment to his JCPenney Platinum MasterCard was
reported to the Department of Homeland Security because this payment
was "a certain percentage higher" than Walter's normal payment.

Kerr reports this with the standard mixture of
snarky sarcasm and grave concern for endangered rights.

Walter called television stations, the American Civil Liberties Union
and me. And he went on the Internet to see what he could learn. He
learned about changes in something called the Bank Privacy Act.

"The more I'm on, the scarier it gets," he said. "It's scary how easily
someone in Homeland Security can get permission to spy."

Eventually, his and his wife's money was freed up. The Soehnges were
apparently found not to be promoting global terrorism under the guise of
paying a credit-card bill. They never did learn how a large credit card
payment can pose a security threat.

But the experience has been a reminder that a small piece of privacy has
been surrendered. Walter Soehnge, who says he holds solid,
middle-of-the-road American beliefs, worries about rights being lost.

"If it can happen to me, it can happen to others," he said.

But at this point I'm saying: doesn't this kind of sound like the
story about the
UMass
student who claimed that
DHS agents visited him because he checked out
Quotations From Chairman Mao over Interlibrary Loan? His story
fell apart over the course of a few days, but it remains as a
demonstration of how
easily both bloggers and MSM-types can be gulled by a yarn that feeds
their political preconceptions.

Is that happening here? I think so.
One warning flag is that
Kerr (apparently) is relying solely on Soehnge's version
of events. And Lehman relies on Kerr, and Sullivan relies upon
Lehman. There's no independent verification at all.

And it's tough to tell what's being referred to by
the "Bank Privacy Act".
But this suggestive blurb
appers at the ACLU website in the midst of
a 1990 article entitled "ACLU Says Banks Continue to Spy on Customers":

The ACLU said that it was only seven years ago that Congress amended the
Bank Secrecy Act to require that banks file so-called "suspicious
activity" reports, which banks must file whenever a transaction of
$5,000 or more is carried out by a customer.

The "Bank Secrecy Act."
Is this what Soehnge is talking about? Almost certainly. It Googles up
a storm, anyway. It was originally passed in 1970; as the ACLU says,
it requires banks to
file "Suspicious Activity Reports" for out-of-the-ordinary
financial activities, and the results go to a host of law enforcement
agencies. The details of what banks are required
to report have changed over the years, and
some of the changes are due to the Patriot Act, but the main reporting
mechanism
has been in place for decades. (The banks have some discretion
about what to report, and this recent WSJ article
suggests that they're erring on the side of Way Too Much.)

If you're in the mood to browse the regulations, here is
the "Comptroller's Handbook" issued by the Treasury Department.
One of the things it expects banks to report is a "spike in the
customer's activity with little or no explanation."
And (please note) the date on this document is September 2000,
well before the Patriot Act was a gleam in the eye of Chimpy
McBushitler.

Hence, I strongly suspect that what Walter Soehnge experienced
with his big check to JCPenney was a routine occurrence, both
before and after the dreaded Patriot Act. Silly as it is, it's nothing
particularly new.

Of course, if anyone wants to rip out the 36-year-old legislation
that requires banks to routinely report weird-ass financial transactions
to the Feds on the possibility that they might be related
to illegal activity, they'll get two thumbs up from me.

But the point here is that this is almost certainly not a privacy
abuse due to Dubya, Homeland Security, and the Patriot Act. Even a
little skeptical checking on the part of Kerr, Lehman, or Sullivan
might have revealed this. Instead it looks as if we're seeing the
same old story:
Bush-hatred makes one incredibly gullible, incapable of
thinking critically about tales that seem to show we're all in
terrible peril of losing our rights because of That Man.

At least Andrew Sullivan doesn't do this sort of thing
on a regular basis. Oh, wait …

Counterintuity

David Mastio looked harder
at the Federal Reserve study on family income. (I snarked about it here.)
He finds plenty that has been totally ignored by Major Media,
almost certainly because it doesn't comport in with their story line.
You may find some surprises too, like I did, so check it out.

Reading Andrew Sullivan's comments
on the AP stories about the pre-Katrina White House briefings
reminds me of the gnomes. Andrew pronounces
the AP stories "damning evidence of this president's eery [sic]
detachment." He comments:

Four days after the storm, Bush declared "I don't think anybody
anticipated the breach of the levees." He was either lying or had slept
through his pre-storm meetings. The latter is possible. The record shows
he asked not a single question in the pre-Katrina briefing. Maybe he was
miffed his vacation had been spoiled. Michael Brown seems on the ball in
comparison.

Like the Underpants Gnomes, Andrew apparently sees something like
this as happening:

But there is, in fact, no credible scenario that gets you from
Phase 1 to 3 in this case. Andrew doesn't even attempt
to provide one. Neither
does the AP.

Andrew frequently claims to be a "conservative", but episodes like this
show that he's in thrall to the unconservative utopian
vision. If only
wise and moral people were in charge, this could not have
happened! We must find the stupid and malicious people! Give us
scapegoats! Preferably ones named "Bush"!

All this would be bad enough if the AP stories accurately summarized what
was actually said in the briefings. But people who've
compared the provided source material with the AP stories conclude that
the AP significantly misrepresented the briefing content.
See, for example, Power Line:

The AP article is fatally compromised by its factual errors, and adds
nothing to our understanding of the issues surrounding Hurricane
Katrina. … The AP took what appears to have been a substantial
quantity of leaked material, and turned it into a brief against the Bush
administration.

This is a hit piece in search of a body. First, they lie and falsely
claim that a video shows Bush being warned in an emergency meeting that
the levees might break -- when all the video really shows is a TV
weatherman (on the tube) warning people that water might flow over the
top of the levees. And second, they have no clue themselves what Bush
might have done if someone had told him there was a chance they might
break... run over to New Orleans and stick his finger in the nearest
dike?

There's lots of heavy breathing on the left about the AP story, but
unfortunately for them it has all the hallmarks of the Bush Air National
Guard story on 60 Minutes II by Dan Rather and Mary Mapes. The AP has
dressed up mundane video to try and prove that President Bush (and
everyone else) knew that the levees in New Orleans were going to breech.
The problem is the evidence they present in their story to make that
point does nothing of the sort.

Could Andrew Sullivan have bothered to do the critical thinking and
skeptical fact-checking of original sources, just like at Power Line,
Big Lizards, and WizBang? Sure, he could have. But apparently that
kind of thing is not
in his business plan.

Inequality, Eek!

A running gag in The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
involve variations on the line: "There are two types of
people in the world, my friend …"

In that spirit, I'd like to say: There are two types of
people in the world, my friend: those who get all excited
about inequality and those who don't understand
the first kind of people. I'm in the latter group.

This observation is set off by a Daniel Drezner
blog
entry where he mentions he's also usually "unfazed
by income inequality."
(He also adds some
reasons why other people might not be as fazed as they could be.)
Professor Drezner was,
in turn, inspired by a Brad
DeLong blog entry, which (in turn) quotes liberally (heh)
from a Paul Krugman NYT op-ed column behind the
TimesSelect wall; it's clear that DeLong and Krugman are
in the first group.

Here's Krugman:

So who are the winners from rising inequality? It's not the top 20
percent, or even the top 10 percent. The big gains have gone to a much
smaller, much richer group than that. A new research paper by Ian
Dew-Becker and Robert Gordon of Northwestern University, "Where Did the
Productivity Growth Go?," gives the details. Between 1972 and 2001 the
wage and salary income of Americans at the 90th percentile of the income
distribution rose only 34 percent, or about 1 percent per year. So being
in the top 10 percent of the income distribution, like being a college
graduate, wasn't a ticket to big income gains. But income at the 99th
percentile rose 87 percent; income at the 99.9th percentile rose 181
percent; and income at the 99.99th percentile rose 497 percent. No,
that's not a misprint.

And my attitude is about 50-50 between

So what?

Good for them!

We're supposed to look at these numbers and shiver with horror and
revulsion,
apparently, but (once again) there are two types of people in this
world, my friend, and I'm the type that doesn't do that.

Let me mention some common well-known
fallacies about these kind of numbers:

The people in the "top X percent" of the income distribution
aren't the same people from year-to-year, although the Krugmans
will invariably speak as if they were an unchanging group
of citizens over years and decades. This feeds the "us-versus-them"
resentment mentality, but it's a considerable fudge.

Also the strong implication in Krugmanesque rhetoric is that the amount
of income in any given year is a fixed, given, pie. Once it's baked,
someone (the "distributor", I guess) figures out how to "distribute"
it.
If someone gets
more of the pie, it necessarily follows that someone else got
less than they would otherwise. This (of course) also
feeds the "us-versus-them"
mentality. But there's no such cause-and-effect. Someone's income
is a result of economic activity, not a baking recipe. If Steve
gets a $5000 raise, that doesn't mean that $5000 inexorably (and
somehow magically) disappears
out of everyone else's paychecks.

But let's assume that, fallacies and eat-the-rich rhetoric aside,
a small fraction of people (unfortunately none
of them our close personal friends) really do have considerably
higher incomes and wealth than the rest of
us from year-to-year. Again: (a) so what?; and (b)
good for them! Is it any skin off our relatively unwealthy noses?

Krugman and DeLong would no doubt go out of their way to deny that
they're powered by mere resentment; they probably think
that those numbers indicate that there's some real trouble
a-brewin' due to income inequality.
Here's Krugman's handwaving on the matter:

Both history and modern experience tell us that highly unequal societies
also tend to be highly corrupt. There's an arrow of causation that runs
from diverging income trends to Jack Abramoff and the K Street project.

Let's be generous and assume the correlation Krugman asserts between
inequality and corruption is correct. (Even though, since it's Krugman,
there's no particular reason to believe it's not bullshit.)
Even if that's true, isn't it clear that the
"arrow
of causation" points the opposite direction than
Krugman implies? Were the Indian tribes that hired Abramoff caused to
do so (somehow)
because of inequality? Or did they do so to shift "income inequality"
their own way? The question answers itself; corruption
is almost certainly a cause of increased inequality, not the other way
around.

Finally, I'd be derelict if I didn't (like Prof Drezner) link to
James Joyner, who does a little math on Krugman's numbers:

So, shockingly, only the very rich are very rich. Or, to put it another
way, not that many people make $6 million a year. Or, to put a number on
it, only 29,821 Americans make that amount.

City of God

I'm supposed to like this a lot better than I did. It's number
15 on IMDB's top movies of all time. But to my mind, it's
not that great. The "shocking" thing here is you see children
getting shot, and children shooting people in return. But once you
get past that, there's not much else except a standard story
of criminal rise and fall, which has been done numerous times,
and better.

There's
also a lot of tricky camera-whirling, which seems to have impressed some
people. But it's just not my cup of tea.

Hitting the Big Time

I regret forfeiting the much-coveted prize ("guided tour of NR World HQ,
free coffee provided"), what a fargin' ripoff,
but I'll somehow go on with my life without it. Should have told Derbyshire that
I read his book.
(And this is
sitting pretty high up on my to-be-read list.)

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